Read by Jennifer Tan
I know when it is noon.
Though I am blind and dumb and kept in a small cell in the rafters of the Royal Observatory, I know when it is noon.
I know because at precisely that time a retired ship’s surgeon will carve the day’s date into my flesh. Each letter, each numeral, is a series of slashes of the knife. He cuts swiftly, with precision. The wound is then sprinkled with the “powder of sympathy”, a pungent, acrid substance which reacts violently with my tortured skin and burns, and burns, and burns.
Halfway round the world, they hope that the deep cuts they make in me are felt by my twin sister. We are part of a sea trial, she and I, an attempt to claim the prize promised by the Longitude Act of 1714. Her role as the seafaring twin was decided for her because she, though as blind as I am, can cry out as I cannot, and so alert the distant sailors aboard the schooner Regina, that it is noon here in Greenwich. By comparing this with their own, local noon, they will then know their longitude.
So goes the theory.
The sea trial will be deemed a failure, a relief perhaps to any other twins born to our abject poverty and equally lacking in those attributes by which they might be deemed human. For we are referred to not as people, but as dogs. That is how we are seen: two worthless lives, two souls so damaged from birth that until this cruel experiment began, we weren’t even given names.
Now, they call me Sirius, after the dog star.
They call my sister Venus, the brightest of the wandering stars. They imagine her wandering across the oceans, looking to the dog star to know her place upon this Earth.
You must wonder how it is that I know what I know; how it is that I can even tell my story, when I lack the senses you take so easily for granted.
You assume, as does the surgeon, that because I am dumb I am also deaf.
You assume that because I cannot see, that I cannot write.
I have learnt the shape of your words. With my fingers I have traced the rough edges of the scars they leave on my skin. These have been hard lessons, every word carries the pain of cutting it into my flesh; this is how I order my thoughts, by the long, sharp strokes of an L, by the twist that tugs at the skin for the curve of a C, by the swift back and forth of an S. Each letter I know by how it feels to have it inscribed upon me, the lesson reinforced by the searing agony of the caustic powder with which my wounds are sprinkled.
I am ignored by the surgeon, and by the two who throw the rancid food into my cell and who all too rarely sweep the soiled straw from it. They are carefree with their words, these fools, for what does it matter what is said in front of one who cannot repeat what they say?
I think back to when my sister and I shared a filthy, infested bed in the hell in which we were raised - a hell that I now long to return to. She would croon to me, her awkward voice a balm against the kickings and the abuse that was always there, always sudden and always unforeseen.
When we were brought for the first time to Greenwich, and, for the first time, separated, I could still hear her through the thin walls of our cells, and I was not as concerned as I should have been.
And when she cried out in pain, when some terrible injury was done to her, I shared that pain, and thrashed and jerked in torment. To the evident satisfaction of the great and good men there present.
If only I had stayed still, our fate might have been different, and she would not be lost to me now.
My cell is quiet, with only me in it. If I lie still I can hear the conversations happening next door, or below. There is a great space there; once a week a crowd throngs, a meeting of the Commissioners of the Discovery of the Longitude at Sea, and the voices of the speakers are raised above the din of the multitude. From them I have learnt of the Prize that condemned my sister and I.
They talk about it incessantly, one crazed scheme after another. Sometimes they mention the Regina, and I know that these men, for all their fine learning and long words, do not know what I know: that the Regina will never return home, that it moulders at the bottom of the ocean.
I know this, because I have felt it. When my body was only half as scarred as it is now, I awoke breathless and panicky, a feeling that only intensified as I struggled to suck down the dank night air, as my bloodied hands beat upon the floor, until suddenly a bucket of my own filth was thrown over my shuddering form. As the cold rank liquid dripped off my face, I knew with more certainty than I have ever known anything before, that whatever small space my sister was confined to aboard the Regina it was flooded, and my sister was drowning.
I felt her anguish in every part of me, across the miles of ocean and land, I felt the pressure and the burning flames in her lungs as the ship surely sank.
Afterwards, as I sat huddled in a corner while my gaolers laughed and spat and kicked, I was consumed by an emptiness that hollowed me out from within, and I knew that for the first time, I was truly alone.
I could not comprehend why the surgeon still came the next day, and the next. How could he not feel it too? How could he not know?
The Regina is overdue. Fourteen months it has been gone. There are few parts of me left that remain unmarked by the passage of time, by the surgeon’s knife. But still he keeps coming. Every day the surgeon cuts the date into me, sending an unheeded message to the bottom of the sea that it is noon here in Greenwich.
Today is the last such day.
Though I am blind, I hear the key in the lock as the surgeon opens the door, his footsteps as he approaches across the wooden floorboards.I know how long it takes between the lifting of the rags that cover me and the first cut of the knife. I smell his stale sweat and feel his hot breath and steel myself. The surgeon rests the point of the knife where he will make his first cut and exhales to steady his aim. With my left hand that I have wriggled free of my bonds, I reach out and seize his wrist, and with my other I twist and slam the sharp blade into his exposed throat.
I wait until I can no longer hear the drumming of his heels on the straw-strewn floor before I withdraw the knife. It does not take long.
Though I am mute, I inscribe my story - this story - for all to read, whether by sight or by touch, onto the body of the surgeon. I swiftly slash each neat letter, feeling the splash of the still warm blood spill onto my fingers, hearing the drip to the wooden boards at my feet. I hope - I pray - that it will drip all the way through to the congregation gathered in the great space below, as they sit there discussing balloons and cannon ships and the moons of Jupiter, and let those learned men know, that it is Noon, here, in Greenwich.
(c) Vincent Kelly, 2014
Vincent Kelly writes in a shed on an allotment in Cornwall, where he can watch his untended plot return to the wild. This is his first piece for Liars' League, but hopefully not his last.
Jennifer Tan (left) trained at the Oxford School of Drama. Theatre includes In Doggerland (Box of Tricks), Dim Sum Nights (Yellow Earth) and The Chamber of Curiosities (Latitude Festival). She is best known as the voices of Nadia and Jody in the fitness app Zombies, Run! and has been a Liar for many years.
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